“If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home” Exhibition

Children's Museum of the Arts

poster for “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home” Exhibition

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The Children’s Museum of the Arts (CMA) announces If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home on view in the Cynthia C. Wainwright Gallery. This exhibition takes cartography and mapping as its starting point and includes contemporary artists whose work references maps and mapping. Cartography, from two Greek terms chartis (map) and graphein (to write), is the study and art of making maps. The first explorers started creating maps to help them understand their own surroundings, as well as places beyond their conception. During a time when the world was thought to be flat, many of the first map-makers began embellishing maps with creatures we now know never existed – they were certain that dragons and mythical beings existed just beyond their worldview.

Maps help us glean spatial information about physical areas, but also have a history of capturing the imagination. They brilliantly compress complex ideas about space, scale, topography, power, social condition, and much more. The artists included in If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home take these ideas to the next level and recall those first fantastical cartographers, using maps to blend the transitional with the experimental. These contemporary artists use maps as their personal playground, using them to communicate elaborate ideas and critiques on complex concepts such as personal identity, politics, and even culture. As a medium, maps provide these artists with the freedom to interpret the meaning of the world around them.

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Schedule

from September 14, 2015 to January 17, 2016

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